Letty Levine is dead. Never paid her bill. Her son said I should take anything I want to cover it. She has avocado curtains and pink pillows. Nothing I can use. But she has a whole lot of the Erle Stanley Gardner books. I said you'd be over to take them. You can give me what you want when you sell them.
Another piece of the puzzle, but at least there were many who would mourn her passing. “She was a fixture,” someone had once said. Always at town meetings. Beating up on the school committee for spending too much money every year. A town-council member for decades. She had been a widow for as long as Henry could remember.
Leaning on the kitchen sink, Henry reread his father's note as he considered what he should do. Going to the bank for Jack's money could wait an hour. The thought of picking up a load of Perry Mason novels at Mrs. Levine's did not thrill him, and would be better done and finished with. Then again, lugging them back to Beacon Hill on the trolley did not make sense. Henry imagined the stubby little book-club volumes he saw at every library sale and cursed out loud. Because of the long popularity of the Perry Mason television show in the 1950s, millions of copies had been sold. If they were in perfect condition, he might get two dollars apiece. Why did the old man do things like this to him?
With all her public works, Mrs. Levine had also been a thorn in his father's side nearly forever. He could still remember her calling his father over to fix things at all hours, and never understood why his father put up with it. Henry figured he might as well pick the books up now and maybe just leave them in his father's kitchen until the next time he came for the van. Maybe the old man would read one or two. At least that would be some form of payment. In any case, he knew his own reluctance was actually the fear of encountering Leona.
The Levine house, up the block and around the corner, was almost an exact copy of his father's and probably built by the same people at the same time—about 1910. All of these houses were three-floor rectangular boxes, smaller versions of the cheap triple-deckers which crowded Boston but with shallow peaking roofs instead of the flattops and planted with just a little more space between. They had been made to house the influx of Irish workers who had previously gained their financial foothold in nineteenth-century slums downtown and were ready to move up to a better life in the “suburbs” of Brookline Village.
Now, as the old timers passed away one by one, even this cheaper housing was being transformed into condominiums by Henry's own generation. A one-floor unit had recently sold just a few doors away for more than what a small palace in South Brookline used to go for when he was a boy.
On hearing the figure, Matt Sullivan had said, “Only lawyers could afford to live in one of those."
His father was right about more than that. Mrs. Levine had not changed the color of her curtains. Henry found her son, Joe, boxing up odd objects in the living room, with the front door open to clear the way to his already well-packed minivan in the driveway. Henry was greeted first with the sound of a breath blown dramatically as Joe turned his head up to look. “Jeez, what a job. She never threw anything away."
Henry looked at the scattering of sorted piles. This was a common sight in his business. He shook his head in sympathy. “I was sorry to hear about your mother. She used to make a wicked peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
Joe nodded at that. “Thanks. She did, didn't she?"
They shook hands while Joe was still half bent over the box he was filling. Henry had played both basketball and baseball with Joe Levine until they graduated from high school. This was no longer the bony guard who knew how to use his elbows. Joe kept his legs spread wide as he bent, with butt thrust well back to counterbalance the mass of his upper body. His stomach pulled against the buttons of his shirt. Henry had bumped into Joe a number of times through the years. The weight had been added steadily.
Henry said, “If you need help, I know a guy who cleans out houses."
Joe tossed a hand in the direction of the other piles. “Nah. My sisters want most of the stuff. I'm just taking some of the bric-a-brac. My wife, Molly, is doing flea markets lately. You ever do flea markets?"
Henry wondered if he would ever be reduced to that. Could the book business change that much?
"No."
His answer was perhaps a bit too emphatic.
Joe persisted. “She does pretty good. It's only seasonal, of course. But she'll make more than I do on an average day."
Joe was a high-school math teacher now in Newton. Henry might have predicted a future like that. Some things worked out the way they were supposed to.
He thought again of Joe's sister, Leona. The odd green-colored couch which was now shoved to the side had been an important place in Henry's life. He had not even seen Leona for at least twenty years.
"Is Leona here?"
He shouldn't have asked.
Joe turned an eye up at him. “No. Tomorrow. She'll be here tomorrow .... She's divorced, you know."
Ever-helpful Joe. Henry moved to discourage that line of conversation.
"I actually came by for some books. My dad said your mother had some Perry Mason books and he was taking them in some kind of trade."
Joe pointed with another swing of an arm. “Trade. Hell. She never paid him. I told him he could take anything he wanted. He just said he wanted the books. They're in that box in the corner. Take ‘em away."
It was an oversize moving-company box, too large to be hauling books around in, and by the weight, it was packed. Scanning the floor for an open space, he could see little room to be looking at them on the spot.
Henry hoisted the box onto his shoulder. “If I miss her tomorrow, say hello to your sister for me."
He had said it to be polite and was sorry as soon as the words were out. Leona's brother knew too much about that high-school romance to let a casual comment get lost. Joe nodded as he left.
Henry carried the box around to the back door of his father's house and put it up on the kitchen table. With the light directly overhead, it was clear to him as soon as the first flap had been turned back that the box was not filled with book-club editions.
Gardner was a Massachusetts boy, born in Malden, who had worked dozens of jobs before training himself in the law and passing the California bar. His great success had been shaped by the writing of hundreds of stories for pulp magazines like Black Mask in the 1920s and ‘30s. For mysteries, Henry had always been more partial to Raymond Chandler or good old Conan Doyle. Henry had never particularly liked Gardner's style or his sketchy characterization. But the plot twists were always entertaining.
The condition of these were mixed: few truly fine, and several lacking their dust jackets. But they were almost all first printings. There were over forty of them, each published long before the popularity of the television show which had made Perry Mason a household name even to nonreaders.
Had they always belonged to Mrs. Levine? Or were they something left from her long-dead husband? Again Henry stirred the odd thought: he made his living from the death of others. At the very least he had that in common with Erle Stanley Gardner.
The burden of the box of Perry Mason books riding his left shoulder had increased greatly by the time he had carried it up from the Arlington street subway stop and across the Public Garden to Charles Street and headed up the hill.
Mrs. Prowder's narrow brick row house on Chestnut Street was further compressed within by the rise of the stairway to the right, directly in front of the entrance. This left a pinched room at the front on the left, which had once been a parlor. Mrs. Prowder had used this as her living room, with her favorite chair close to the frame of the window for the best view and facing the door she always left open when she was awake. On each of the upper floors there were two studio apartments, one at the back and one at the front. Henry's apartment was at the front on the third floor. Mrs. Prowder had used all of the first floor, with her kitchen and dining room to the rear on one side and her bedroom at the back beneath the stair.
Mrs. Prowder's doo
r was open. Henry took the excuse to set the box beside the stairs and ducked his head in to see what was happening. It was an apparition of Mrs. Prowder who sat in the chair beside the window now.
The woman who stood up for him was Mrs. Prowder as she might have been thirty years earlier. Her hair, still the bright orange of the fruit, was cut shorter. She was possibly a bit taller, and perhaps heavier. She wore the same rimless bifocals, but instead of a dress, she wore a flannel shirt and jeans.
She spoke first, as Henry stared. “I'm her daughter. I'm Mary. Which one are you?"
Henry smiled unconvincingly. “Henry Sullivan. Third floor."
Her eyes narrowed, as if she had finally caught him. “You're the book guy. Good. I could use your help."
The makeup she had used to darken her eyelashes had been wiped by her sleeve into a gray feather on the pink of her cheeks. He guessed she had been crying.
Mary led him into the dining room, a space Henry had never actually been in before, only seen from the front room. There on the wall, across the table from a glass cabinet full of imitation Blue Delft, were built-in shelves lined floor to ceiling with row after precise row of books exactly equal in height and width. Here was every procrustean Reader's Digest edition ever published, or so it seemed.
She said, “What is the best thing to do with these?” Presenting them with a sweep of her hand.
Henry had always imagined that the editorial staff of the Reader's Digest was made up of a menagerie of barely anthropomorphic creatures, missing an arm here, a leg there: this one a hand, that one a foot, some eyeless altogether. Educated by machines in sunless rooms, they must huddle for hours over desks lit by sputtering candles, while fed gruel on paper plates by conveyor belt, the sounds of their own sneezing and coughing absorbed in the hiss of old Muzak tapes from the 1960s played endlessly. There they took fresh new novels, biographies, and histories and snipped them with the kind of scissors handed out to first-graders, removing any word they thought might offend an imagined public of maroons who would be shocked from their intellectual sleep by too many syllables or a colorful four-letter word; cutting chapters that ran more than eight pages, trimming pictures larger than four-by-six inches, all in order to produce shortened versions of popular books which might fit four at a time in the stubby little uniform volumes they called “condensed."
Henry answered, “You would do the human race a favor by putting these in a dumpster."
She stared at him a moment, not speechless as much as unready to speak. He could not tell if his brutal answer was taken with humor or even understood. He tried to clear up any confusion.
He said, “I'm sorry. It's not a time to be flip, I guess. It's just me. I guess that was rude .... They're not the real books, you understand. They're shortened to sell to people who don't want to take the time to read a whole book. Your mother was a sweetheart, and I know she was sharp right to the end, so I am totally flummoxed as to why she would have these."
Mary Prowder laughed then, loudly. Not a happy laugh. “I'm not hurt. It was my brother, Richard. He gave my parents a subscription every year for Christmas. She never read them. Dad never did, either. You can look. They've never been opened. The jerk never gave them more than three phone calls a year. Rich never visited except during the holidays, and he only lives in Albany, for Christ's sake."
Henry had never heard Mrs. Prowder speak of her son. He was wary of entering into another family dynamic. “That's too bad. Someone should have told him."
She laughed again, but this time with more control and a sad shake of her head. “She told him only once—every Christmas. Rich would come for Christmas dinner and leave before dessert because he said he had such a long drive back. He works for the state government. He's a lawyer. Lived at home all the way through Suffolk Law and then left one day for Albany because his buddy had a job for him there, and he hardly ever came back. That's the way he is. An asshole. Now he's left me with this. Says he doesn't have time to help. But you can be damn sure he'll be here to pick up his half of the check when we sell the place. He won't miss out on that."
Henry hoped his nod appeared sympathetic and let her finish before he spoke. “Do you think you'll be selling the building soon?"
Her answer was immediate and said in a flat voice. “Wednesday."
He looked for some sign of humor in her eyes. “You're kidding."
She repeated, “Wednesday. The real-estate guy called me this morning. He already has a buyer. This is Beacon Hill. Every nouveau-riche techie, doctor, lawyer, and politician in town wants a row house on Beacon Hill. No parking—no problem. Historic district restrictions on renovation—no problem. Shortage of reliable and qualified electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and bricklayers who have an honest bone in their body—no problem. Shortage of money—never...."
Henry stood back to answer, “Well, my father is an honest electrician.” It seemed like a weak defense.
She shook her head at him. “Tell it to the lawyer who bounces you out of here. I can't keep the place. My brother wants his money. The IRS will be looking for their death tax. I bake bread for a living. I can't afford to keep it. I grew up here. I broke my arm on those front steps when I was twelve. I hid in the attic from my asshole brother until he got old enough to be afraid of girls. It would be nice to keep it, but I have to support my own family, and I can't pay Beacon Hill property taxes.” Her voice was changing as her throat closed on her words. Henry looked down at the threadbare carpet.
Henry said, “I understand."
She continued to shake her head. “No, you don't, really. She always kept the rent low for you guys. But the politicians don't give a damn. They raised the taxes every year anyway. You're pissed that you'll have to move, and I don't blame you, but I can't help it any more than I can deal with the rest of this shit.” And she was starting to cry again.
He said, “It's okay. I've moved before. I can handle it."
She began to shake.
Henry reached out a hand for her shoulder as she fell toward him. He held her for several minutes before she took a deep breath and pushed herself away. Extracting a wad of tissue from a tight front pocket, she began to blow her nose. She finally spoke with the tissue still at her face.
She said, “I'm divorced. You could have taken liberties."
He answered automatically, “I'm sorry."
She laughed, less painfully this time. “Your face is red,” she said through a smile and sniff. “I've embarrassed you. My humor isn't always ... The whole thing has been a little more than I can handle. We buried her yesterday. Next to Dad. My brother showed up for five minutes. It was a very moving ceremony. My kids and I all crying and my brother looking at his watch and the priest saying ‘Powder’ instead of ‘Prowder,’ and her friends all sitting in lawn chairs and chatting about the color of the leaves this year because the ceremony started an hour late.... My daughter even wrote a poem to read, and they never gave her a chance because there was another funeral waiting behind us. God, when I die, I want it to be on an ocean liner with icebergs and a band playing. I'm sorry. I just don't have anyone to talk to. You're a good listener...."
Henry backed up. He thought it was a good moment to break away. “I have a friend, Albert, who cleans houses out. He's good—and honest. Let me know if you need help. I have to take care of a few things right now."
She smiled again. She was prettier when she smiled. He had always imagined Mrs. Prowder was a good-looking woman in her time.
The old stairs barked beneath his added weight. The bittersweet smell of marijuana seeped into the half-dark of the hall from Eliot's door along with a Beatles tune he could not remember the name of. Old Mrs. Prowder had always discouraged smoking in the house. Eliot was taking quick advantage of the changing of the guard.
Henry opened his own door on a trim of late sun highlighting his window frame and illuminating the whole small room in an antique glow. He was happy to be home.
When he called his father late
r, the best of the Erle Stanley Gardner books were spread out on the table ready to be photographed.
His father sounded irritated at his surprise and told him so. “I knew they were good books, or else I wouldn't have offered to take them. Joey was ready to chuck them out on the curb yesterday. But they're yours now. I'll look forward to a check whenever you get around to it."
He always underestimated the old man. His father could still read Latin now almost fifty years beyond his own high-school days. He may not have ever read a mystery novel in his life, but he could recognize a regular edition of a book from a book club.
Henry chastised himself. “I'll drop a check on you when I have another appointment and I come for the van."
The old man grunted before speaking, a habit he had in common with Albert when they had something unpleasant to say. “Jack was by, wasn't he?"
It was best for Henry to keep his answers short. “Yeah. I saw him earlier."
"Needed some money, did he?"
And it was always best to keep everything aboveboard with the old man.
"Yeah. A quick loan."
His father said, “Don't let him get in to you for too much. He still owes me for a bag of marbles I bought for him at Nantasket Beach once. He forgets. He's getting old."
"Yes, sir."
His father's sense of humor never changed. He grunted again. “You know, her daughter called about an hour ago."
But the change of direction left a momentary silence as Henry worked on an answer.
"Leona?"
"The one with the big boobs. Anyway, yes, I believe it was her. The one you got involved with."
What other surprises did the old man have coming?
"How do you know about that?"
The old man grunted yet again.
"Hell, we all knew about that."
Henry remembered the great lengths he had gone to in an attempt to keep it all a secret. Leona had never been shy, but Henry feared his father's wrath. That was how Henry had once broken an arm—trying to climb out his third-floor bedroom window in the dark of night to meet Leona on her porch.
Hound Page 4
